Hi,
Here is my attempt to bring fontconfig-ultimate project to Gentoo. Read more about it on author's homepage: http://bohoomil.com/ or below.
It's supposed to be hassle-free so I'll try to keep it short

They may look bad if your monitor doesn't have RGB subpixel layout. Test it here.

Motivation

Probably like most of you I've run into many problems with font rendering on Gentoo. Fontconfig / freetype updates used to break it fairly often and I cba to configure everything manually. Eventually I've decided to deal with it for good. In the process I ran into fontconfig-ultimate project, wrote an ebuild and lived happily ever after.
Looks great, doesn't noticeably change with updates and doesn't require me to maintain it.

Installation

If you want to preserve your current settings you can make a backup copy of /etc/fonts/conf.d

Keep in mind that some web browsers have internal font rendering engine. Eg. so as to use freetype with firefox you need to compile it with system-cairo use-flag.

Some details after all

The package consists of:
1. A set of configuration files for fontconfig and lcdfilter fine tunning font rendering. Default fontconfig configuration is quite rough and specific fonts need some tweaks to look good. These are provided here.
2. A set of font replacement rules for generic font families (serif, sans, monospace, cursive, fantasy). ultimate-ms and ultimate-free presets use microsoft free internet fonts and their metric-compatible libre alternatives. fonts-extra use-flag installs replacements for even more font families.

All fonts are individually configured for best looks.
Keep in mind that specialized printing and rendering software (such as ghostscript, libreoffice, document viewers, some browsers) use their own fonts and rendering engines so they wont get affected unless compiled with special use-flags (system-cairo for firefox).

Let me know what you think. Please report bugs to me for now because Gentoo's version differs from original.

Yes it would be cool - especially for non-latin scripts.
However there are some difficulties and I don't think it will happen unless a gentoo dev picks it up. Adding gazzilion font ebuilds to sunrise and maintaining them isn't an option now.
There are 138 fonts in ib-fonts and the total number of fonts in portage is 169 atm. This puts things into perspective
I'll work on adding some more fonts from portage as dependencies though. Now with pfl things will get easier.

This is why I asked if there was a standalone font manager. This would be the best solution for now.

edit: Keep in mind that all default fonts for five standard font families are pulled in as dependencies by fonts-free and fonts-ms use-flag. Some other fonts from ib-meta-extended-lt are pulled too if you enable fonts-extra use-flag.

I can see a massive difference with this version, the odd kerning that existed for some fonts has been fixed and everything just looks so much better. I also downloaded most of the infinality-bundle fonts and and I think they're helping.

I'm interested in making an ebuild of for the fonts bundle, one ebuild for the whole lot would be ok? When I downloaded and extracted them all they had a lot of unnecessary stuff with them, mainly for the Arch packages, any suggestions on the best way to cherry pick the fonts and nothing else?

If any of you want to help get this into the official Gentoo tree, please contact me, so we can work out details. And maybe you can help proxy-maintain (since my time is limited). Let's get the best possible font rendering into Gentoo!_________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

Thanks fau.
Both Thunderbird and Firefox fonts are way better than before.

There's only one thing that hasn't improved:
Some characters are either blueish or redish.
This also occurs in text writers be it libreoffice,kate,kwrite or editra,even text in Gimp!
I wonder what could cause this.
Gerard.

Edit: The blueish and redish fonts I also had before._________________To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

If any of you want to help get this into the official Gentoo tree, please contact me, so we can work out details. And maybe you can help proxy-maintain (since my time is limited). Let's get the best possible font rendering into Gentoo!

There's only one thing that hasn't improved:
Some characters are either blueish or redish.
This also occurs in text writers be it libreoffice,kate,kwrite or editra,even text in Gimp!
I wonder what could cause this.
Gerard.

Edit: The blueish and redish fonts I also had before.

Try different sub-pixel settings. eselect fontconfig has several options for 10-sub-pixel-*. One of them should be correct for your display. (Tho I'm not sure at this point if that is overridden by infinality.)_________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

Thanks for this hint, I will try this fontconfig, before I was following this guide. But some pages in firefox where improved, some others got worse..

What is a good setup for eselect infinality and lcdfilter? Looking at /etc/fonts/infinality/infinality.conf I see all are based on Arial, but Linux is using the DejaVu fonts which I prefer. So current I have set both to "linux".

And then how do I test that easily after switching? Do I need to restart X, the WM, or just an application?_________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G Ram|amd64:HP EliteBook 8560w,i7-2620M,16G Ram|amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),8G Ram|amd64-prefix:OpenSuse
Lila-Theme

But switching the default font in Xfce between Sans and DejaVu (book or condensed) results in different fonts. So what font is Sans aliased here actually?
Then only DejaVu Sans book looks sharp, the condensed starts blurring, same for the Droid Fonts. Another sharp font I found after all the new font deps that came from fontconfig-ultimate, is Noto Sans._________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G Ram|amd64:HP EliteBook 8560w,i7-2620M,16G Ram|amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),8G Ram|amd64-prefix:OpenSuse
Lila-Theme

Thanks fau.
Both Thunderbird and Firefox fonts are way better than before.

There's only one thing that hasn't improved:
Some characters are either blueish or redish.
This also occurs in text writers be it libreoffice,kate,kwrite or editra,even text in Gimp!
I wonder what could cause this.
Gerard.